Joseph Pearce > Quotes

“To live a creative life we must loose our fear of being wrong.”
― Joseph Pearce

“For Tolkien, Catholicism was not an opinion to which one subscribed but a reality to which one submitted. Quite simply, pseudo-psychology aside, Tolkien remained a Catholic for the simple if disarming reason that he believed Catholicism was true.”
― Joseph Pearce, Tolkien: Man and Myth

“Although secular fundamentalist “progressives” might believe in a future “golden age,” such an age does not exist. The future that they herald is merely one of gathering gloom and ever darkening clouds. This fate has ever been so for those who proclaim their “Pride.” They have nothing to expect in the future but their fall.

As for the Christian, he has nothing to fear but his falling into the pride of despair. If he avoids becoming despondent and retains his humility, he will receive the gift of hope which is its fruit. Where there is hope there is the Way, the Truth and the Life.”
― Joseph Pearce

“The dragon sickness is a euphemism for the bourgeois materialism which is rife in our consumerist culture. Smaug’s fury at the loss of a single insignificant and practically useless trinket serves as a metaphor for modern man and his mania for possessing trash that he doesn’t need.”
― Joseph Pearce, Bilbo's Journey: Discovering the Hidden Meaning in "The Hobbit"

“In the absence of virtue and wisdom, intelligence becomes a servant of evil.”
― Joseph Pearce, Bilbo's Journey: Discovering the Hidden Meaning in The Hobbit

“That which is timeless is also the most timely.”
― Joseph Pearce

“To me the art of the Counter Reformation was a pure joy and I loved the churches of Bernini and Borromini no less than the ancient basilicas. And this in turn led me to the literature of the Counter Reformation, and I came to know St Theresa and St John of the Cross, compared to whom even the greatest of non-Catholic religious writers seem pale and unreal.19”
― Joseph Pearce, Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief

“When Belloc said that the Protestant Reformation was the shipwreck of Christendom, he was simply stating a historical fact, but it was controversial because history is political.”
― Joseph Pearce, Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc

“For Chesterton and Tolkien, the goodness, truth, and beauty of fairy stories are to be found in the way they judge the way things are from the perspective of the way things ought to be. The should judges the is. This is the way things ought to be. We do not condone selfishness merely because it is normal, nor should we. A healthy perspective always judges selfishness—most especially our own selfishness—from the perspective of selflessness. In the language of religion, we always judge sin from the perspective of virtue, that which is wrong from the perspective of that which is right. Fairy stories share with religion the belief in objective morality, which is the fruit of the knowledge of the union of the natural with the supernatural and therefore the communion of the one with the other. This moral perspective is condemned by the materialist and the relativist, which is why such people are equally skeptical of the respective value of fairy stories and religion, seeing both as intrinsically untrue.”
― Joseph Pearce, Frodo's Journey: Discover the Hidden Meaning of The Lord of the Rings

“growing up is about growing in wisdom and virtue and learning to curtail our selfishness so that we can give ourselves more selflessly to others.”
― Joseph Pearce, Bilbo's Journey: Discovering the Hidden Meaning in "The Hobbit"

“commencement address at Harvard University in 1978, Solzhenitsyn shocked his audience by suggesting that “the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion” was not attractive to those living in Russia. “It is time, in the West,” Solzhenitsyn said, “to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.” The triumph of rights over obligations had resulted in a destructive and irresponsible freedom, leading to “the abyss of human decadence.” He criticized the “misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, such as motion pictures full of pornography, crime, and horror,” which illustrated the surrender of the West to the corrosion of evil. “The problem at the root of the West’s malaise,” Solzhenitsyn explained, was rooted in the “rationalistic humanism” of the so-called Enlightenment:”
― Joseph Pearce, Benedict XVI: Defender of the Faith

“And here is the paradox at the heart of the Christian life: The one who embraces suffering, who dies to himself in order to die for others, is actually happier than the one who shuns suffering and who puts himself above all else.”
― Joseph Pearce, Bilbo's Journey: Discovering the Hidden Meaning in The Hobbit

“The war against the dragon is not, therefore, a war against a physical monster, like a dinosaur, but a battle against the wickedness we encounter in our everyday lives. We all face our daily dragons and we must all defend ourselves from them and hopefully slay them. The sobering reality is that we must either fight the dragons that we encounter in life or become dragons ourselves. There is no “comfortable” alternative.”
― Joseph Pearce, Bilbo's Journey: Discovering the Hidden Meaning in The Hobbit

“Compare Chesterton’s view with Ratzinger’s: It is precisely woman who is paying the greatest price [for the sexual “revolution.”] … Woman, who is creative in the truest sense of the word by giving life, does not “produce,” however, in that technical sense which is the only one that is valued by a society more masculine than ever in its cult of efficiency. She is being convinced that the aim is to “liberate” her, “emancipate” her, by encouraging her to masculinize herself, thus bringing her into conformity with the culture of production and subjecting her to the control of the masculine society of technicians, of salesmen, of politicians who seek profit and power, organizing everything, marketing everything, instrumentalizing everything for their own ends.13”
― Joseph Pearce, Benedict XVI: Defender of the Faith

“He could not write what he wanted, but what he had to.”
― Joseph Pearce, Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc

“To go to seances with good intentions is like holding a smoking concert in a powder-magazine on behalf of an orphan asylum.’4”
― Joseph Pearce, Literary Converts

“My descent into delinquency was aided and abetted by the progressive philosophy adopted by the school. No effort was made to impose discipline, which resulted in the triumph of anarchy in the classroom and the survival of the fittest in the playground. In the former, the disruptive elements made it difficult, if not impossible, for teachers to teach and for students to learn. In the latter, the school bully and his coterie of friends ruled the roost, making life miserable for everyone else and making playtime a time of fear. I”
― Joseph Pearce, Race With the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love

“every life should be a quest to achieve the goal of heaven through a growth in virtue, thereby attaining the power, through grace, to overcome the monsters and demons which seek to prevent the achievement of this paramount goal. It is in this way and with this understanding of the meaning and purpose of life that we are meant to read The Hobbit and it is in this way, and this way alone, that we find its deepest and most applicable meaning.”
― Joseph Pearce, Bilbo's Journey: Discovering the Hidden Meaning in The Hobbit

“At the Battle of Five Armies, as it became known, the men of the Lake fight with long swords whereas the goblins wield scimitars. This places the battle symbolically as a clash between Christendom and the Infidel, the forces of goodness wielding the broad swords of the Christian crusaders whilst the forces of darkness fight with the curved swords of Islam. The same symbolism is employed in The Lord of the Rings, in which orcs are armed with scimitars whereas the men of Gondor fight with long swords.”
― Joseph Pearce, Bilbo's Journey: Discovering the Hidden Meaning in "The Hobbit"

“Gandalf’s very last words are unequivocal and could not be starker or plainer: “Be good, take care of yourselves—and DON’T LEAVE THE PATH!” Here we see Gandalf as the archetypal father-figure advising his children as they embark on a journey on which he cannot be present to watch over them that they should be good, be careful, and don’t do anything stupid! The advice is, however, charged with Christian moral guidance, which the everyday language might obscure if we are not paying due attention. Being good, i.e. virtuous, is the prerequisite for success, whereas taking care implies the need to practice the cardinal virtues of prudence and temperance. Most importantly, the emphatic exhortation that they should not, under any circumstances, leave the path reminds the Christian of the words of Christ: Enter ye in at the narrow gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there are who go in thereat. (Matthew 7:13)”
― Joseph Pearce, Bilbo's Journey: Discovering the Hidden Meaning in "The Hobbit"

“Gollum is, however, a fully embodied image of the sin addict’s soul. He brings to life with monstrous vigor the words of Christ that everyone who sins is a slave to sin10 and the teaching of St. Paul about the slavery of sin.11 As a mirror of scorn and pity toward man, he is so powerful that we only have to visualize Gollum as the shriveled wreck of our sin-enslaved soul to shiver in horror and disgust at the vision being presented to us. It’s as though the English language needs a new verb, to gollumize, so that we can express the grim and graphic reality of this vision of the reality of sin. It”
― Joseph Pearce, Frodo's Journey: Discover the Hidden Meaning of The Lord of the Rings

“Even as we grieved for the passing of one pope, our minds and prayers were already turning to thoughts of the next. The Church was under siege from her secularist enemies from without and was being betrayed by the modernist fifth columnists from within. She was in need of a strong and faithful shepherd to protect the flock from the wolves outside her walls, baying for her blood, and the wolves in sheep’s clothing within her own ranks, betraying her with a kiss.”
― Joseph Pearce, Benedict XVI: Defender of the Faith

“his war against modernism and its worship of the spirit of the age. He restored the splendor of truth in his defense of orthodoxy and the splendor of the liturgy in his restoration of tradition. He fought the wickedness of the world in his unremitting and uncompromising battle against the dictatorship of relativism and its culture of death.”
― Joseph Pearce, Benedict XVI: Defender of the Faith

“The mistakes of my youth have allowed me to see what true love is through the experience of its absence. They have allowed me to see that love is not a feeling but an action. It is the laying down of one’s life for the beloved. It is not the laying down of someone else’s life or body for our own gratification. Ultimately, as a Christian, I have come to see that love is not merely an action but a commandment. We are commanded to love the Lord our God and to love our neighbor—and our enemy. Clearly true love has nothing to do with selfishness in any”
― Joseph Pearce, Race With the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love

“Antes de llegar al catolicismo, pasé por diferentes etapas de lo que fue una lucha larga y duradera. Es difícil explicar con detalle las distintas fases. Tras estudiar y reflexionar detenidamente, llegué a la conclusión de que los males que sufría Inglaterra, capitalismo, imperialismo brutal, industrialismo, fortunas ilícitas y destrucción de la familia eran consecuencia de que Inglaterra no fuera católica. La tesis anglocatólica da por supuesto que Inglaterra siguió siendo católica a pesar de la reforma o por su causa incluso.”
― Joseph Pearce, G. K. Chesterton. Sabiduría e inocencia

“but in later life Chesterton made no secret of the fact that he didn’t care for institutionalised learning, describing education as ‘being instructed by somebody I did not know about something I did not want to know’.”
― Joseph Pearce, Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G.K. Chesterton

“I learned from the recklessness of my youthful relationships that unbridled passion is destructive and brings neither happiness nor satisfaction. On the contrary, it brings suffering to all concerned. I also learned that the feelings that lead to such relationships have nothing whatever to do with love. Selfishness is never love.”
― Joseph Pearce, Race With the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love

“«Qué haríamos con dos millones (si los tuviéramos)», explica la diferencia entre los filántropos y los cristianos: «Los filántropos se los darían a los pobres que se lo merecieran, y los cristianos, a los pobres que no lo merecieran; porque si los cristianos fueran verdaderos cristianos, lo primero que pensarían es que ellos mismos constituían un ejemplo de ricos que no merecían serlo»”
― Joseph Pearce, G. K. Chesterton. Sabiduría e inocencia

“My life since my conversion has, therefore, been an ongoing act of atonement. In particular, I have sought to use the gifts that God has given me to glorify Him and to bring souls to Him, in contrast to the way that I had previously used those same gifts to glorify his enemies and to lead souls astray. This has been the rationale behind my vocation as a Catholic writer in the twenty-five years since my conversion. The”
― Joseph Pearce, Race With the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love

“In short, and to put the matter bluntly, without the healing power of grace we are not be able to reason our way to God because we will lack the desire to engage with the reality beyond ourselves. In refusing this grace, we excommunicate ourselves from the world of objective reality, exorcising the power of reason instead of exercising it. In so doing, we condemn ourselves to life imprisonment, turning our very lives into a living death sentence. Since”
― Joseph Pearce, Race With the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love